Sparks fly in this fiery attempt to deconstruct Muhammad and erase Islam, if readers believe that fire can burn.
Pressburg attempts to debunk Islam and its founder, Muhammad.
Originally written in German and titled Good Bye Mohammed, (2009) this pseudonymous English translation exemplifies several recent books whose express purpose is to degrade Islam. Pressburg’s book uses linguistics, history and textual analysis to depict Islam as a belief system made from whole cloth. In fact, Pressburg contends that the Prophet Muhammad never even existed. For his linguistic disputation, Pressburg relies on the work of Christoph Luxenberg, who suggests that the Quran was not written in Arabic but in Syro-Aramaic, an early Christian language. From this perspective, Pressburg contends that the 72 virgins promised to male martyrs in paradise are merely a mistranslation of 72 shiny grapes. Using the same translation, Pressburg interprets the word muhamad to be a general honorific referring to Christ, not to a specific man of that name. “There is no doubt,” Pressburg says, “that the term muhamad did not refer to a person but that it was used to denote a title.” Early on, Pressburg also asserts Muslims were in fact only Christians. Such statements do little to establish this work as a piece of objective scholarship; rather, the aim is to erase Muhammad and Islam from history in an argument that, at its core, seems to harbor a deep-seated loathing and rejection of Islam. The warped narrative barely disguises this repugnance behind a facade of reasonable discourse that, despite its less-than-robust nature, actually makes for an intriguing read.
Sparks fly in this fiery attempt to deconstruct Muhammad and erase Islam, if readers believe that fire can burn.Pub Date: June 23, 2012
ISBN: 978-1468129038
Page Count: 272
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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